Climate

The Trump administration is considering a new strategy for throttling the country’s offshore wind industry, after federal judges blocked its five previous attempts to stop wind farms under construction off the East Coast.

Senior administration officials are drafting settlement agreements that would pay nearly $1 billion to TotalEnergies, the French energy company behind two wind farms off New York State and North Carolina, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times, including copies of the agreements.

Under the terms of the proposed settlements, the Interior Department would cancel the leases in federal waters for the two projects, known as Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay, the documents show. The Justice Department would then pay more than $928 million to TotalEnergies, reimbursing the company for its winning bids in lease sales during the Biden administration.

In exchange, TotalEnergies would abandon its plans to begin building the wind farms. It would also commit to investing in natural gas infrastructure in Texas, as the Trump administration prioritizes the production of fossil fuels over renewables like wind and solar power.

This is one where I had to click through to the article solely because the headline was too stupid to make sense. We are paying $1 billion of taxpayer dollars in order to undo green energy that was already in process? What reason could there possibly be for not only making our energy policy worse, but paying through the nose to do it?

Mr. Trump has disparaged offshore wind power since 2012, when he tried unsuccessfully to stop a wind farm visible from one of his golf courses in Scotland. He has often called the projects ugly and inefficient, and he has claimed without evidence that they are “driving whales crazy.”

Oh, right. We are a country whose every action must curry approval by narcissistic sociopath with the prefrontal cortex of a 2-year-old.